Blizzard Presents: Design a Reaper of Souls Legendary Item

Pretty must just throwing up the blue quote here, since it’s got the info:

Have you ever wondered what kind of sweat, tears, and ritual sacrifice goes into designing a Legendary item in Diablo III? Or perhaps even entertained the idea of creating a Legendary of your own?

Well, hang on to your hauberks, Sanctuary, and ready your anvils. It’s time to get crafty.

The “Design a Legendary” Project

Inspired by the many passionate discussions we’ve seen about itemization (particularly Legendary itemization) in Diablo III, we wanted to take some time to expand on our evolving design philosophies and practices, as well as reiterate our goals for Legendaries in Reaper of Souls.

As we started to put our pens to the proverbial paper, though, we had an epiphany: “Hey, instead of just telling players about item design, why not actually show them?”

And so the Design a Legendary project was born.

So, How’s it Work?

Over the next few months, we’ll take you through the all the different design stages behind bringing a single Legendary item to life, from concept to creation to iteration, all the way through animation and implementation. We’ll chat with each developer involved and share progress updates along the way, giving you a unique behind-the-scenes look at what goes into making a Legendary item that looks epic, feels epic, and fits within the larger network of hero skills, monster tuning, and overall game balance.

Pretty sweet, huh?

But wait — that’s only one part of this project! (Oh snap.)

Tell us more, Lylirra!

We’ll also be involving you, our awesome community, in various parts of the design process. Leading up to release of Reaper of Souls, you’ll have the opportunity to not only weigh in, but actually help guide development on a Legendary item that will be implemented and playable. We’ll be holding global community votes, hosting podcasts, soliciting ideas, and even running a contest or two to ensure that this is truly a worldwide, player-driven initiative.

The result? We hope this activity will help give players a better understanding of everything that goes into item design, as well as wind up being something that’s both fun and uniquely interactive. Also, once everything is said and done, there will be a Legendary item in the game that you had a hand in making. How cool is that?!

Since most fans seem to think they could have designed far better legendary items than we saw in Diablo 3, it’s going to be interesting to see how this even unfolds. The datamining has thus far leaked a ton of early/hypothetical proc effects for legendaries in RoS and they *seem* to be on the right track of making the items interesting and maybe build-changing, so surely the community brainstorming this one legendary will receive must guarantee its success?

Bonus Lylirra reply from comments on the blog post:

This is an amazing idea, but I think you should do one for each class so that they can be more meaningful and interesting without being clunky like stone of jordan or mara’s. Lylirra: Depending on how well this particular project pans out, maybe we’ll be able to do another round of “Design a Legendary.” If that happens, doing more than 1 Legendary is certainly something we can consider!

Monk fist concept arts.

Incidentally, I wouldn’t count on the item being a Monk Fist just because that’s what you see in the title graphic, because that’s the only piece of weapon concept art they’ve ever released. Literally! Look in our Diablo 3 Items gallery, it’s got dozens of images showing off gear sets and such, but there’s just that one sketch-style image of Monk weapons, which Lylirra used for the graphic for this post, and which was released years and years ago.

I knew this at a glance because 1) my mind is hopelessly clogged with useless trivial details about the production and promotion of Diablo 3, while 2) I forget the name of any human being I’m introduced to in five seconds, and 3) because I enjoy weapon/armor concept art and wish they would release more of it.

Comments

“We started to put our penis to the proverbial paper” It took me several takes to realise they weren’t admitting to some kind of weird sexual practice.

That aside, I really like Lylirra. It’s going to be horrible to see her pulled down into the commoner pit below and brutally and relentlessly assaulted until she has a nervous breakdown and is “moved onto other projects”. Gotta love the Blizzard community.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I don’t think Blizzard community managers are that nihilistic. Sorry about the triple posting, but there’s no edit button and there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent forum thread.

The curiosity of “it could have been Xanth” is that the one they did hire, Nevalistis, has posted almost solely on lore and story stuff. And AFAIK Xanth doesn’t know or care a fig about that aspect of the game. So unless the job description was “read all the lore and start commenting on it” he would be carrying on an entirely different style of conversation as a Bliz CM.

“Logan’s Claw” is my personal favourite. It’s so uninspired, it is like it has been designed by the sanitor during his lunchbreak. There is nothing epic about it, nothing moody, nothing clever, it is just bad on every level.

“Or perhaps even entertained the idea of creating a Legendary of your own?” Looks like Blizzard is looking very closely at Path of Exile (If you pledge enough you can design a legendary with the devs). They could learn a massive amount from those guys!!

PoE is a fantastic game, and I’ve thrown some of my precious £s their way already, but the whole “pay (a lot of) money to design X thing” is a very standard thing in every single Kickstarted game ever, plus a lot of general F2P games. Their way of getting monetary support is a great way of supporting a game that works perfectly even if you don’t pay, but optional or not (after all, paying real money in D3 was optional) what they give you for your money is exploitative and bizarre.

I think the RMAH, even just the GAH, really detracted from the game, but it’s very strange to go from that to a game that says “Pay $12,500 to design a monster” and come out with the latter being the good guys.

Well, by your estimations for what a good unique design turn-around should be, if the D3 team is adding about 200 new legendary items (based on data-mined information), it should take them about a year or so to finish those all up. Does that mean they’re on schedule then?

I think the point Winterfell was making is that the design process for D2’s items could also be seen as lengthy. I mean, a lot of the best legendary items were added with D2X, so it’s probably safe to assume it took Blizzard North about a year to make all of those items.

I don’t really see what ease of adding items to the game has to do with your argument though. I thought we were talking about game design, which I tend to assume amounts to more than just plugging numbers into a .txt file.

Um, I meant a day or two tops to do ALL of the uniques. That is, 1 or 2 days to do 100-200 uniques. Not 1 or 2 days each.

I’m not counting unique graphics, which about 1/3rd of D2 uniques had in that estimate. That would take longer. But the graphics aren’t the important part.

I guess to be fair, we should include the extra time required to programme attributes like Deadly Strike and Crushing Blow, which only appeared on uniques. But again, those concepts, at least for D2C, wouldn’t have taken much time.

Source: For 1.08 and 1.10 of D2LOD, I sent a list of ideas to modify uniques to Peter Hu. Took me about 3-4 hours to go over all of them and tweak the stats here and there to make them more powerful and themed. Peter took about 50% of my changes verbatim and made his own tweaks on top, and I believe it only took him a few hours to do.

I had some class in college that said when people are polled for opinions, negative ones are more likely to submit them. This slants the impression that everyone is negative, when there may in fact be a satisfied majority.

While this may be true, both the positives and the negatives are overwhelmingly crushed by masses that have no opinion or do not care (for reasons of fatalism, absurd stupidity,… and so on).

Besides, the stigma of “negativity” needs to go. Diablo 3 was a massive failure on very many design points, which is why basically all of its classes and systems are being or have been overhauled. Does it make me negative to point it out, or just… objective? Negative responses =/= negative individuals or behaviour.

Now, to respond to Destructor:

The reason people are responding poorly to this is because of how ridiculous this is. As pointed out earlier, items are far from the deep and complex process Lil’s making it out to be. It’s almost as if they were using this as a form of propaganda to show how much they’re doing when really… this should have been done for the Crusader class, something that is actually meaningful. One item is nothing. A presentation like this is the equivalent of spanning the buttering of a toast over the course of several months. And documenting it.

I think many people are judging Jay Wilson too hard. Probably he was just in the unlucky position to execute the orders of ActiBlizz management who were only interested in making more money and did not care about potential damage to the Diablo brand.

And while I think that the current development team is doing a much better job I also think that the reason for this is at least partially more freedom given to them by the management.

Rubberband of False Promises Legendary Amulet +1 Mainstat +2 Vitality +Resource generators now regenerates a random amount after a randomly timed delay within 10 seconds after each use. +Randomly take 3 steps forward and 2 steps back +This effect is currently under extensive iteration and will be updated soon (actual in-game text on item)

“We hope this activity will help give players a better understanding of everything that goes into item design”

el oh el

a better understanding? of everything that goes into item design? funny how the blizz blues are apt at twisting words. NOTHING is to understand from the player side, as there hasn’t been put ANY work into itemization up until several months obviously.

also, on the contest side, i’m really unsure. how much +mainstat should we consider? 400-500 at least? the item with the highest +mainstat will win the contest i assume? because, you know, blizzard hasn’t parted with the retarded mainstat system and a good legendary MUST have a big mainstat bonus, there is no way around it now.

Well, lol, that sentence has indeed a somewhat humorous ring to it. While the opportunity to learn from exclusive insight is always welcome, one would actually prefer to learn from people with proven qualifications rather than from those desperately asking for your creative input.

By the way, is ‘the community’ supposed to feel honoured now to be the chosen target for Blizzard’s gratuitous inspirational outsourcing? 😉

nobody at blizzard can tell me that the game wasn’t released prematurely for more profit and fast RMAH online-going. there is NO WAY the game and the itemization in particular has stood some quality assurance test before, and the insta-dying on inferno 1.0 was only one thing of thousands things to prove it.

that’s why “fixing” the game simply won’t do. re-develop game systems yes, but fixing will not change a dime.

While this may be true, both the positives and the negatives are overwhelmingly crushed by masses that have no opinion or do not care (for reasons of fatalism, absurd stupidity,… and so on).

Besides, the stigma of egativity needs to go. Diablo 3 was a massive failure on very many design points, which is why basically all of its classes and systems are being or have been overhauled. Does it make me negative to point it out, or just… objective? Negative responses =/= negative individuals or behaviour.

Now, to respond to Destructor:

The reason people are responding poorly to this is because of how ridiculous this is. As pointed out earlier, items are far from the deep and complex process Lil’s making it out to be. It’s almost as if they were using this as a form of propaganda to show how much they’re doing when really… this should have been done for the Crusader class, something that is actually meaningful. One item is nothing. A presentation like this is the equivalent of spanning the buttering of a toast over the course of several months. And documenting it.

Yep. Fundamentally the part of making a legendary in D3 that seems to take the longest is the art etc, which is probably the aspect of a legendary that players care about least.

Maybe it’s because the art department are the only really competent department at Blizzard, so they leverage them as much of possible, effectively resulting in “make-work”, in a desperate attempt to try and give their games depth by throwing art, not gameplay or systems, into the package.

I just hope someone with more talent than me designs something to go with the Horadric Hamburger. Like Faud’s fries and Warriv’s wine. Then we could get a complete FUN!! meal in Whimseyshire. Oh, a legendary oar too, Up s#@t creek without a paddle, Bliz?

Bashiok v2.0 will teach The God of designing steps? [The god pauses a while to ponder the value of unlawfully cloning original Bashiok in female form, finding none. v3.0 should have a lot bigger… IQ]

I, Clavdivs, The God, declare this pointless, since item cap on trifecta is supposedly removed, so every item will look like trifecta+main+something, or be useless.

The God reconsidered initial figures for trifecta caps, and decided they should be more strict, or their affixes higher – player need to have opportunity to reach cap in 4-5 items maximum, instead devoting short mortal life in finding them all.